I read a brief but scathing review of the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica by Web DM's Jim Davis, which took me a little aback. I've really enjoyed the book, and his very low score for it contrasts greatly with what I think of as one of my favorite supplements they've made.
That being said, I do suppose that I can understand some of the criticisms.
I, of course, was a Magic player long before I was a D&D player. I played during the original Ravnica: City of Guilds block, and so Ravnica hits a big nostalgia button for me. If your childhood (or teenage/early 20s) years were defined by places like Eberron or Ravenloft, I suppose I do wonder what you would make of Ravnica.
Despite the rich look and feel to the various guilds, their existence is purely the expression of a Magic the Gathering mechanic - the guilds each represent one of the ten potential two-color pairs in a five-color magical system. The creative team nailed the intersection of each of these pairs so elegantly that the Guilds took on their own iconic status - as if Magic were now a game being played with ten colors instead of five.
The Guldmaster's Guide takes a special effort not to mention the colors of magic. To a large extent, I see the wisdom in that. The Boros Legion and Cult of Rakdos are both Red guilds, but you would be hard-pressed to see two more distinct guilds. Would introducing the concept of color - either as a purely aesthetic thing or perhaps an alternative to alignment (as I've suggested in the past) have helped people get more into the setting, or would it have been a distraction?
The book spends most of its pages discussing the various guilds. Each greater chapter is generally divided into sub-chapters for each guild - one talks membership, rank, and background benefits. One is a series of maps with suggestions for adventure and campaign plots revolving around each guild. The Bestiary and NPC list are also somewhat divided between guilds.
Clearly the Guilds are the defining feature of Ravnica as a setting. But the review does point out a few things that might be better clarified.
One is technology - the presence of the Izzet League suggests that Ravnica is in a bit of anachronism stew when it comes to technology levels. You still have people fighting with swords and axes, but there are also elevators, flamethrowers, espresso machines, and artificial lighting.
Another is the day-to-day life of the average citizen - half of Ravnica is guildless, but there's not a ton about what it's like to live a guildless existence in the city.
One thing I would agree to be fairly notable in its absence is history. The guide tells you a lot about how things are now, but there are some massive time-gaps. The "present day," which takes place in the era between the Return to Ravnica block and the current Guilds of Ravnica block, is one in which Jace Beleren is the Living Guildpact, but we don't see a ton about the events of the Decamillenial (the plot of the first block) nor the vast 10,000 year history when the Guildpact was doing its job.
We don't get much about the pre-Pact Ravnica either. Just as in the card game, we know almost nothing about the Nephilim.
Now, I'm a big homebrewer when it comes to lore. My campaign has been set within my own original setting and I generally think of that as the way to do D&D (Critical Role, for example, is all in Matt Mercer's homebrew setting of Exandria - though now that there's a Tal'dorei campaign guide published does it still count as homebrew?) So in my case, I don't mind the missing history as I figure it's an invitation to fill in the details that you want to.
One thing I think the book pushes is a kind of episodic storytelling structure. Gaining renown seems to work best using discrete missions with a "renown point" as a big reward, and might also encourage you to rotate plots between the different guilds your party belongs to. Fitting this system into a larger, serialized campaign story is going to require the DM to be a little clever about it - how big of a step along the way counts as a mission, for example.
Again, I don't know quite how a total Ravnica neophyte would react to the book. I've shown it to some of my D&D group and they find it interesting to be sure, but I don't know how ready they are to run a campaign set there.
Right now my D&D group is on a bit of a hiatus, and I don't want to totally drop our long-running campaign to just do Ravnica, but I'm hoping for a chance to a short-term campaign as a little side-story at some point, probably after the next major adventure (which could take up to a year to play through...)
There will definitely be some things I'm going to steal from the book, though. In my setting there's a faction very similar to House Dimir that will likely have two NPCs using Lazav's stats and a group probably using the Obzedat Ghost stats. Also, with a major industrial revolution going on in my world, there's a lot of potential for Izzet elements.
But I do think that, given that the book couldn't be twice as long, we got the most important parts in order to run a campaign set in Ravnica. I don't know if we'll get more supplements to help flesh it out later on or if they're really thinking of it as a one-off crossover.
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